Watching
by Malvolia
Summary: Gambit watches Rogue. Rogue watches Gambit. And Wolverine's got his eye on them both. Set around and during the events of Cajun Spice.
1. Gambit Watches

He's been watching her for weeks.

Nothing better to do, really. With Magneto gone, he's back to living to get by, and he can get by just as well here in Bayville as anywhere else, right?

He starts out loitering around the school, getting the lay of the land. Soon he's progressed to sitting on out-of-the-way walls or in the leafy branches of trees. Nobody ever sees him, but he sees everybody. They're—different. The whole group of them, different. They seem to enjoy each other's company.

Not that he hadn't enjoyed working for Magneto. The job certainly had its perks, not least of which was obeying orders by choice instead of out of some kind of twisted sense of familial loyalty. No, he'd enjoyed the work, most times, but he'd never exactly enjoyed the group. A Russian, an Aussie, a megalomaniac, and an ADHD boss' kid. None of them his style.

When he first met the X-Men, he thought it might be worth it to come back around someday. Or was it only after he'd heard her talk that he'd thought that? Her voice sounded like home. Something in her eyes, too, looked familiar, the eyes of somebody who'd been running too long and forgot how to stop.

He's been watching her for weeks now, dreaming up plans to get them running together, running to New Orleans to save his father and then just keeping on down the road, wherever it led to. No place special in mind, he's just been part of a group most of his life and he feels the need for some company.

She comes out a lot at night, more and more often as the weeks go by. Sometimes she's breathing hard and he can tell from the look on her face that she's fresh from chewing somebody's head off. Sometimes she's rubbing her temples and keeping her eyes on the ground. Sometimes she's brushing away tears.

One night she comes and throws herself down under the tree he's sitting in, and he watches her shoulders shake and hears her frustrated growls and mutterings and he almost reaches down right then to pull her up next to him and take her away. But instead he waits until she's calmed down and gone back inside, and he watches the window he knows is hers and doesn't leave until the light goes off.

He figures out her schedule. She usually rides to school in the morning with Scott or Jean, but sometimes she pulls a favor and gets to borrow a car for herself. When that happens, she leaves early, before anybody else, and drives so fast he has trouble keeping up with her. She parks far away and walks slowly towards the school. On these days, she walks through a small alley between outbuildings. He makes particular note of this.

He watches around outside the school a few days before giving it up because he can only see her when she leaves the school building, and that's only for lunch and for track. She doesn't seem to like the latter, but it's obviously not because she's no good—the girl has moves. At lunch she's not so good. Her discomfort around all her friends must be real obvious if he can see it from across the parking lot.

She's rarely by herself when she leaves school in the afternoon. Even on the days when she drives herself, someone or other usually rides home with her. So afternoon won't work, and evening is out because he's not in the mood to wrangle with the likes of Wolverine, thanks very much, and so it has to be the morning.

He hides between the buildings in the alley for days before his chance comes, but he never gets impatient. He knows she'll come around sooner or later.

After all, he's been watching her.


	2. Rogue Watches

He was good, yeah, but come on—she hadn't trained with the X-Men for years without learning a few things. How to tell when she was being watched, for example. Especially when someone was fool enough to riffle playing cards inside an empty, echoing alleyway.

After she'd heard that, she'd become more watchful herself. She'd catch glimpses of a trench coat slipping around buildings, hanging over branches, moving silently in the darkness of a secluded corner. Once, sitting out on a balcony watching the stars, she turned her eyes to the trees and caught a glimmer of red that she pretended not to see.

So she knew he was keeping an eye on her. So what? No harm in looking, right? She didn't tell any of the others. She knew they'd freak out, and he wasn't hurting anybody. Besides, she could take care of herself.

She doesn't expect anybody to come after her when it turns out he had more in mind than just looking. She'd good as told them she was leaving, anyway. And then when he tells her where the train is heading, she isn't sure she wants them coming. Not just yet.

She watches him play stupid card games and rejects his offer to teach her one. She tells him she knows more about cards than he'd guess and he says he doesn't doubt that she could say that for a lot of things. Despite his expressed preference for the queen of hearts, she notices it's the ace of spades he flips over and over between his fingers when he's not playing.

He has a constant smirk on his face. She wonders if it has anything to do with knowing she's watching him and decides it probably does. He's the kind to be flattered by any attention at all. She sure doesn't intend to flatter him, but she watches him anyway. With nothing else to do in the empty boxcar, she figures it's her turn.

Every move he makes is casual, unhurried. She remembers the look in his eyes when she had him hanging off the train. Even then he'd looked like he was just relaxing, like he was enjoying every second. Like he was laughing at her. She remembers him telling her she was too tense, and doesn't think kidnapping somebody and hauling her clear across the country is a good way to get her to relax. She points this out to him, and the smirk gets broader.

When they reach New Orleans, he jumps off the train like he's done it a million times before. She's off before he can turn to help her, and close behind him as he darts between the cars, over the tracks, and through a break in the gate surrounding the rail yard. He runs like the wind but still manages to look like he's doing it for fun instead of to avoid rail yard security. He winks at her as they clear the gate and switches over to an ambling walk as they head into town. She makes a point of rolling her eyes heavily.

He weaves through back ways and crowded streets like he owns the place. She guesses it has to be his home turf—this is how she used to move back home in Mississippi. And he knows the really great hole-in-the-wall places, the ones tourists avoid and so the ones that serve up the best atmosphere. Sure, getting ambushed before dessert isn't the kind of atmosphere she was looking for, but it's…fun, sort of. Even though they've never worked together before, they move like a team. So when he tries to head off on his own, she follows him.

They're not a team, not really. She knows it the moment her ear brushes his hand. She gets flashes of his father, flashes of a plan, and she is so mad she almost walks off and leaves him lying there alone in the dark.

But she sits and watches him instead, simmering, waiting for him to wake up so she can let him have it. Once she stretches a hand towards his face and stops it, hovering so close she can feel the warmth radiating from his skin, knowing how easy it would be to learn the rest of the story, and then she pulls back, because she already can't get him out of her head and she doesn't need any more up there.

He has the gall to look hurt when she laces into him, to protest that he didn't mean things to turn out this way, but all she hears are more lies from one more person who used her, and that's when she leaves.

On her way back to the boat, she sees herself. She sees herself sprinting on the track behind the school—sitting at a picnic table with her arms folded—yelling at a teammate—crying on the institute grounds—sleeping a drugged sleep in the boxcar of a train. She's already shaking her head to clear the images before she gets that they aren't hers, that they were all stuck in his head first. She stops to sort through them, like the Professor's been trying to teach her, and she realizes there are a lot more thoughts just about her than thoughts about how she can help him get his father. And that's when she goes back.

He looks surprised to see her again, and grateful, and that gets him a few points. His father comments on her powers and he shuts him down, and that gets him a few more. By the time he starts to apologize, she doesn't need to hear it. Not that she isn't still mad. She _is_. Just not mad enough to let Wolverine take his head off, that's all.

He leaves her with his lady luck. She remembers he said it's gotten him out of a lot of jams, and that should make her even madder, like he's trying to play a Get Out of Jail Free card. But then she remembers how he held her hand, how when he pulled away his fingers brushed dangerously close to her exposed skin, and how when this thing all started he'd offered her the chance to know everything up front.

She holds on to the queen of hearts and doesn't watch him walk away.


	3. Wolverine Watches

He's been watching her ever since she stood up for that Cajun back in the swamp. She won't talk about what happened when she was gone, and it makes him uneasy. Maybe she's under some kind of mind control or something. He almost hopes she is—it would give him an excuse to go after that cocky former Acolyte. The guy's always gotten on his nerves.

One way or another, it's obvious Gambit's gotten to her. There's no way she would have stepped in back there otherwise. She just pushed a woman off a cliff a few weeks ago, for crying out loud. If she'd felt anything remotely resembling that towards Gambit, she would've let him kick the miscreant around for a while.

He thinks protecting your own kidnapper shows signs of serious mental trauma, but Professor X doesn't seem too concerned. He wonders what the security in this place would be like without a rational adult around. Everybody seems more interested in how Gambit acted than how she feels about it. The prof has even made some comments that sounded disturbingly open to having the Cajun move in, if he wanted to.

No kidnappers are moving in on his watch.

She spends a lot of her evenings out on balconies, watching the sky but casting a lot of glances at the trees. He resets one of the laser cannons out on the grounds to be more sensitive to movement in the branches. She leaves early for school and hangs around late afterwards. He has some of the other kids keep an eye on her. One night he passes her room and hears music coming underneath the door—not the punk rock stuff she's been assaulting the air with ever since she came, but quick and bubbly music played so quietly he couldn't have made it out without enhanced hearing abilities. It sounds like New Orleans jazz. He makes sure there's a security camera with a clear view of her door, and one of her window, just in case she gets any ideas about sneaking out.

In the weeks since she took out Mystique, she was even more reclusive than usual. Now she's hanging out with everybody again, talking to them just like before and laughing a bit more than she used to. The prof thinks Gambit helped her as much as she helped Gambit, but _he _counters that a full-fledged X-rescue would have gone a long way towards restoring her sense of family feeling.

She starts getting irritated with what she calls his over-protectiveness. They get into a big fight over whether he's trying to look out for her or to smother her. It ends when he suggests maybe somebody needs to save her from herself, and she balls her fists tight by her sides and stomps off.

Ororo says he's as bad as a mother hen, and somebody must have heard her say it once, because he catches one of the students whispering something about a mother hen on steroids. He doesn't care what they call him. They can hate him, for all he cares. They'll get over it. They're kids. And nobody, but nobody, steals one of his kids.

He kind of hopes that Gambit comes back around, after all. He's got a few choice things to say to him.

For Rogue's sake, he'll keep the object lessons to a minimum.


End file.
